klein-venedig (12. 341)

Established on this day in 1528 as an outcome of the Treaty of Barcelona in which Holy Roman Emperor Karl V—also king of Spain—seeking relief from debts incurred and privately financed, granted to the Welser family of Augsburg and Nuremberg, a banking firm who claimed ancestry with the famed Byzantine general Belisarius, who reclaimed much of the land of the vestiges of the Western Roman Empire from the Vandals under Justinian I, a charter to rule, explore and colonise the territory known as Little Venice, later Weslerland (the exonym originally from Amerigo Vespucci after the Spanish equivalent), and seek out the legendary El Dorado and seven cities of gold. Governed from abroad, the colony was the German’s most significant stronghold in the Americas and though not lasting two decades before given to Spanish rule over mismanagement and the death of many German settlers and enslaved people dispatched to develop the land, the Welsers’ privilege was propagandised in later years to promote German imperial expansion in the 1880s and 1890s.